Increase Your Custom Blog Traffic By Republishing On Hashnode

Increase Your Custom Blog Traffic By Republishing On Hashnode

Reach new audience with your blog articles

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5 min read

There is always the debate between building your custom blog from scratch or using an existing platform. Especially in the developer ecosystem.

But, what if you want to use both? Well, you do not have to choose between them. You can have a custom blog and also use a blogging platform like Hashnode.

Why not make the best of both worlds? In this article, you'll see how to do that!


Why republish content on Hashnode?

Vector Illustration of a person presenting

You might ask what the benefits of republishing your content on Hashnode are and if it's worth it.

That is a valid question and something many bloggers miss. Thus, the major benefit of republishing your content on a platform like Hashnode is that you reach a massive audience.

Hashnode already has a large and established community of readers. Thus, you can tap into that audience and drive traffic to your blog by cross-posting your articles here. So why not get extra exposure and amplify your reach?

Secondly, Hashnode has a high domain authority, so linking your articles from the platform might benefit you. Search engines value quality backlinks from websites with a higher authority than yours. Thus, by cross-posting on Hashnode, you can improve the SEO of your blog.

Thirdly, it's a low effort activity with a high impact. You can republish your articles on Hashnode within minutes and expose them to a huge audience.

In conclusion, you lose potential traffic, exposure, and SEO benefits by not republishing your articles on Hashnode.


How to republish your content

Vector Illustration of a person working on the laptop

Let's say you want to publish an article on both your custom blog and Hashnode. Firstly, you would publish the article on your blog.

After that, you would go on Hashnode and write the same article. However, before publishing the article, you set the canonical URL.

On Hashnode, it's straightforward to add the original URL of the article. As shown in figure 1, it has an option where you can paste the original URL.

Canonical URL on HashnodeFigure 1

Thus, you would add the URL of the article from your custom blog. Once you add the original URL, you can safely publish the article on Hashnode. The search engines know that the original article is on your blog and will send traffic to that one.


Hashnode's RSS Importer

Importing articles, one by one can be tiresome and time-consuming. Luckily, Hashnode comes to the rescue! Hashnode has an RSS importer that imports your articles automatically.

You heard that right! Hashnode imports your articles automatically and it also sets the canonical URL.

So, how can you do it?

To access the RSS importer, click on your profile picture and choose the Blog Dashboard option from the popup modal.

Hashnode HomepageFigure 2

Once you are in the blog dashboard, scroll until you see the Import section and click on it. That will take you to a new page, where you can see four importers. Thus, click on the fourth option saying RSS Importer, as shown in figure 3.

The blog dashboard on HashnodeFigure 3

The last step is to enter your RSS feed URL and click the Import button. As soon as you press the button, the importing process will start.

Note: If your RSS feed does not contain the article HTML (the article body), Hashnode can scrape the content from the URL provided in the RSS feed. In that case, you need to check the option Scrape post instead of getting post body from the RSS Feed.


Results after joining Hashnode

Let's look at a real-world example and see if publishing on Hashnode is so powerful. In the image below, you can see the blog analytics of my blog - catalins.tech - before joining Hashnode.

My blog was on WordPress, and I was responsible for showcasing my content to people. So I had to do all the work of promoting my articles and make sure people read them.

A screenshot showing catalins.tech analytics before joining HashnodeFigure 4

However, that changed once I joined Hashnode. In figure 5, below, you can see the blog analytics after joining Hashnode.

As the analytics show, my blog grew tremendously:

  • the number of users grew from 19,136 to 116,225. That's a ~500% increase in the number of users!
  • the page views went from 68,460 to 251,872 - which is an increase of ~267%!

I think we can agree this is tremendous growth!

A screenshot showing catalins.tech analytics after joining HashnodeFigure 5

How did that happen?

I was no longer the only one responsible for promoting my articles. Hashnode distributed my articles to its massive audience through their newsletter and news feed.

Moreover, it allowed me to turn first-time visitors into recurring visitors with the following system and blog newsletter. So what do I mean by that? Readers can follow writers and get a notification each time they publish a new article. Additionally, readers can also subscribe to their favourite blogs and get an email each time an article is published.

That way, you do not need to rely on social media and other algorithms to get your content in front of the readers. Instead, they can follow you and subscribe to your blog, which keeps them up-to-date with your articles!


Conclusion

In this article, you learnt what content syndication is and what its benefits are. You also learnt about syndicating your content to Hashnode.

Since Hashnode makes it easy for you to republish your articles, why not take advantage of that?

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